A critical review of local and world news. This blog originally commented on the Moncton Times and Transcript but has enlarged its scope.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

March 4: Racism revisited

Stephen Harper says that Iran is the biggest threat to world peace, and the one he most worries about. Stephen Harper is playing a game with our heads. It's an old game; but it still works.

We humans naturally distrust people who don't look like us or who don't talk like us. Political leaders have known that for thousands of years. And it almost always works. Until very recently, this distrust often took the form of racism. If you said the word Black, the minds of white listeners automatically drew a picture of a person who was mentally and socially inferior. That was true even in New Brunswick until quite recently (and probably still holds true for more than a few people.)

To be a racist was quite respectable and Christian. A century ago and less, the most respectable and learned Canadians complained loud and long about inferior peoples who were coming to Canada and inflicting their debased cultures on us. You know, people like Italians and Slavs and Chinese and Japanese and Jews. Oh, yes, the Canada of the 1930s and even later was not so different from Nazi Germany as we like to think. A quite saintly and intelligent reverend, J.S.Woodsworth, wrote Strangers Within Our Gates, warning us not do let the lesser breeds in. He included Jews among the unsuitable types.

Racism is out of fashion. But those very human instincts live on in new form.

When my students in China heard I was Canadian, they had a vision of me tramping the woods on my showshoes, fending off wolves with my axe. (I regret to say I rather encouraged these images.)

We just naturally divide people up by nationality or religion or language - and then imagine the national or religious or linguistic type. French? Hah! English? Hah right back at you! British, American? Good. Iranian evil. Moslems kill 3000 innocent Americans? Terribly, terribly evil. Americans kill a quarter million innocent Guatemalans? What? Are you anti-American?

It's the new racism, a form of racism nurtured by our politicians and our news media. I expect that Iranians and Afghanis feel pretty much the same way about us, and all those evil ideas coming out from the great darkness of Christianity. That's the trouble with us people. We're all scared of people different from us, and we all convert that fear into a sort of racism. (It's crazy, isn't it? We're all scared of people diffeernt from us. And we all have a tendency to imagines stereotypes. In other words, in a very fundamental way, all us human who fear or look down on those who are different are exactly the same in this behaviour.)

So Harper says he's real worried about them there Iranis. If we were thinking straight that would be laughable.

Iran hasn't invaded anybody in well over a century. However, it was invaded after World War 1 by Britain and Russia who split the oil fields between them, supported a puppet king, and robbed the country blind. (For thirty years, Iran had to supply oil free of charge for the whole British navy.)

In 1951, Iran finally had a democratic election, and the premier decided to nationalize the oil fields and actually charge the British a fair price for the oil. So the British gave a call to the US. The US helped out with special ops forces, propaganda, overthrew the government, and installed a brutal dictator for next 25 years. In return, American oil companies got 35% of the Iranian oil fields. That is what drove Iranians to the only institution in their own country that was still theirs, the mosque.

At last, there was an Iranian revolution. the Shah was deposed; and that's how we got the present situation with a government heavily influenced by religious leadership. (The same, incidentally, is true of Israel - though that's not the image you get in our press.)

Then, in 1980, everybody - the US, Britain, Russia, China, everybody got behind a ruthless dictator who wanted that Iranian oil. They supplied him with chemical weapons and conventional ones. The dictator fought a war brutal even by modern standards. But he lost, to the dismay of his friends - the US, Britain, Russia, China, et al. The dictator's name was Saddam Hussein.

The world is dominated by countries of enormous wealth and population and power. The US has something well over a thousand nuclear weapons. Israel has hundreds. Ditto for China and Russia. Iran has armed forces respectable enough for its size; but scarcely world class. It might be developing one nuclear bomb - though even American intelligence experts are not convinced of that.

But, yep. This is fersure the biggest threat to world peace. Harper can get away with that absurdity only because when he says Iranian, what our minds have been conditioned to see is a religious and murderous fanatic. We're being set up for a war - just like we were set up for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why? One important reason is that the American and British oil industries are desparate to keep Iranian oil away from China.There are also, for Harper, some pretty cheap political reasons. But the bottom line is oil and money.

And the method is the new racism peddled by our politicians and our journalists. For a sample of the method, read almost any foreign news story in The Moncton Times and Transcript.

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About Me

born into poverty in Montreal. (1933 was a bad year to be born.) Kicked out of school in grade 11. Became factory hand, office boy.
Did a general BA, mostly at night at Sir George Williams University, and partly while a youth worker for YMCA, camps, etc. Then teacher training at McGill.
Taught gradea 7 to 11 for six years. Loved it.
Quit to do MA at Acadia, then PhD (History) at Queen's.
Taught history three years at UPEI, then some 35 years at Concordia U in Montreal.
Loved the teaching. Thought the profs had more pompous and useless asses among then than is really desirable outside a zoo.
work experience:
factory, office,social group work, office,camp director, teacher.
Radio - c. 3000 broadcasts, mostly current events.
TV - many hundred appearances, mostly commentaries.
Film - some writing, advising, voice-overs.
Writing - no count, some hundreds. Some academic, but mostly for popular market, and ranging from short stories to stories to newspaper and magazine columns to history books.
professional speaker - close to 2000.
Awards for the above? yep